PHL CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY? IT’S IN THE AIR

SHE’S disappointed. Lawyer Angela C. Ibay of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines said so days before the country’s 13th Earth Day celebration on April 22.

“While we appreciate the commitments made by the Philippine government, we also note with disappointment that only 2.71 percent of the 75-percent emission reduction target remains unconditional, while the remaining 72.29 percent is conditional,” Abay was quoted in a statement last Monday.

Abay was referring to the country’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submitted last April 15 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“This gives much space for the possibility that the NDC targets will not be met in full,” Abay, a lawyer, added. “Climate action must be among our top priorities, as the lives of millions of Filipinos will continue to be affected otherwise.”

The effects are already being felt: it’s in the air.

Sensitive to pollution

LAST year, based on an IQAIR report, the average air quality in the Philippines is 52 US Air Quality Index (AQI), which refers to the color classification of “yellow” or description of “moderate.”

This means that air quality is acceptable but there may be a risk for some people, particularly those who are unusually sensitive to air pollution. To note, the US AQI is the index of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for reporting air quality.

Based on the information posted on a website pertaining to AQI Basics, an AQI value of 50 or below represents good air quality. An AQI value over 300 represents hazardous air quality.

The US EPA establishes an AQI for five major air pollutants namely: ground-level ozone; particle pollution (also known as particulate matter or PM), including PM2.5 and PM10; sulfur dioxide; and, nitrogen dioxide. Sulfur dioxide is naturally released by volcanic activity and produced as a by-product of copper extraction and the burning of fossil fuels contaminated with sulfur compounds.

According to the greenfacts.org website, nitrogen dioxide “is part of a group of gaseous air pollutants produced as a result of road traffic and other fossil fuel combustion processes.”

“Its presence in air contributes to the formation and modification of other air pollutants, such as ozone and particulate matter and to acid rain.”

AQI values

FOR each pollutant, an AQI value of 100 generally corresponds to an ambient air concentration that equals the level of the shortterm national ambient air quality standard for the protection of public health.

AQI values at or below 100 are generally thought of as satisfactory. When AQI values are above 100, air quality is unhealthy: at first for certain sensitive groups of people, then for everyone as AQI values get higher.

The air quality data sources for the Philippines include mainly the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), with eight air quality monitoring stations. The others are: Rhean Group of Companies with one station; Sunwest (1): Unioil Petroleum Philippines Inc. (15); and, an anonymous source with five stations.

Last year, Calamba was designated as having the cleanest city with 24 AQI while the most polluted was Meycauayan in Bulacan, which has an AQI of 83.

Globally, the Philippines ranked 70 out of 106 countries ranked in terms of air pollution in 2020.

Vehicles as source

GREATLY improved air quality is one of the benefits of the community quarantine put in place by the government last year. As mobile and stationary sources of pollution stop operation, the pollution levels have dramatically gone down, DENR data revealed.

The DENR’S own air quality monitoring stations tells the same good news, especially during the first two months when the community quarantine was strictly implemented in Luzon beginning March 17, 2020.

According to Denr-environmental Management Bureau (EMB) Director William P. Cuñado, the situation is reflected in the real-time air quality monitoring stations in various parts of Metro Manila.

“During the lockdown, almost all our stations are ‘green,’ which means the air quality is good,” Cuñado told the Businessmirror in a telephone interview last April 13.

He attributed this to almostzero pollution coming from the transportation sector, with the motor vehicles being the source of about 80 percent of air pollution.

Eased restrictions

“IMAGINE the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that stopped plying the roads of Metro Manila,” Cuñado said in a mix of English and Filipino. “Also, all other sources of pollution like the manufacturing sector stopped operations.”

Sadly, the benefits of community quarantines to air quality proved to be only temporary. As the government slowly opened up the economy, so did the dumping of toxic air pollutants resume.

Greenpeace’s special report titled “Managing Air Quality beyond Covid-19,” said that May 16, or two months after the government eased restrictions from enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) to modified ECQ saw the return of motor vehicles around the National Capital Region. Air pollution returned, albeit gradually.

With the worsening air quality in various parts of the world comes the realization a time will come that even without Covid-19, people may still need to wear face masks or, worse, have an oxygen tank in tow.

Tide reversal

THE quality of the air people breathe reflects the health of Mother Earth amid the exploding human population and destructive human activities happening worldwide.

Incidentally, the theme of “Earth Day 2021,” a global event held since 1970 is “Restore Our Earth.” It became an official celebration after President Gloria Arroyo issued Proclamation 1481 declaring April 22 of every year as the Philippines’ Earth Day.

However, the emission of too much toxic air pollutants vis-àvis the shrinking forest cover— the earth’s lungs—has reduced the country’s carbon-absorption capacity. For years, this combo had also undermined the country’s capacity to produce oxygen to replenish the environment with clean, breathable air.

From an estimated forest cover of about 12 million in 1960, the Philippines’s forest cover is now slightly above only 7 million hectares, or roughly just half of the 15 million hectares classified as forest land.

The effort to reverse the tide of deforestation in the Philippines suffered a huge setback under the Duterte administration, with the P2-billion average annual cut for reforestation in the last five years.

As the government focuses on protecting its existing forest more than attempting to expand its forest cover through massive treeplanting activities, an estimated 100,000 hectares of additional forest cover for each year or a total of 500,000 hectares of additional forest cover in the last five years is inadvertently lost.

Healing the planet

ASIAN Forest Cooperation Organization (AFOCO) Executive Director Ricardo L. Calderon underscored the importance of putting a stop to deforestation and fasttracking reforestation efforts to restore the planet back to health.

“Forests serve both as a carbon sink and provides oxygen for cleaner air,” Calderon, a forestry expert, said.

According to Calderon, the AFOCO, as a multilateral and intergovernmental organization, is now focusing on restoring drought-prone areas, which are prone to major environmental perturbations such as El Niño, extreme rainfall, wildfire including pest and diseases.

“Existing water shortages in these drought-prone areas are projected to increase owing to population increase, land cover change due to human activities and development as well as climate change,” he added.

According to Calderon, a former director of the DENR-FMB and the Biodiversity Management Bureau (BMB), restoration and reforestation in drought-prone areas should be science-based and knowledgebased with consideration of traditional knowledge in order to ensure success.

“Member parties including the

Philippines are already in the process of identifying these areas for inclusion in this major partnership program that includes parties from Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia,” he said.

Ensuring protection

THE DENR, through the EMB, continues to strengthen its air quality monitoring system to ensure that the environment and public health are protected from the dangers of air pollution.

A line bureau of the DENR that sets air quality standards and monitors ambient and point source pollutants, the EMB considers air quality monitoring as a crucial step for taking corrective actions to reduce air pollution, considered as the largest single environmental health risk—causing many non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular and respiratory ailments, stroke and lung cancer.

The EMB has a total of 75 air quality monitoring stations strategically located in 16 regions nationwide, 34 of them capable of continuous online monitoring, while 41 use a manual method of sampling.

Through the air quality monitoring stations, the public can also monitor real-time air quality in various parts of the country.

The air quality monitoring stations are capable of measuring air pollutants, particularly PM10 or particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter and PM2.5, whose diameter is 2.5 micrometers or less.

Fifteen of these stations in eight regions are also capable of measuring gaseous air pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide.

Pollution sources

HOWEVER, Cuñado said the

DENR-EMB is still working to enhance the capacity to monitor PM2.5

He explained that the monitoring of PM2.5 is being prioritized by the EMB because the tiny inhalable particles are able to travel deeply into the respiratory tract, reaching the lungs. These fine particles pose the greatest risk to human health, Cuñado said.

The current ambient air quality guideline values for PM2.5 are 50 micrograms per Normal cubic meters (ug/nm3) for average 24hour short-term monitoring and 25 ug/nm3 for an average 1-year long-term monitoring.

Currently, the air quality standards for PM2.5 are being reviewed and updated by the Inter-agency Committee for Environmental Health, chaired by the Department of Health and vice-chaired by the DENR.

Also, the interagency body is also reviewing the emission standards for stationary or industrial air pollution sources.

“What we want to do is to be able to measure air pollution in major roads separately from industrial and commercial areas so we will know the contribution of mobile sources like motor vehicles and stationary air pollution sources,” Cuñado said.

Such strategy, he added, will help the DENR-EMB come up with a more informed decision and program on how to address air pollution at source.

Legal requirements

ASKED to weigh in and rate the government’s accomplishments in managing the country’s air quality, Khevin Yu of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, told the Businessmirror that the Philippine government started on a high note with the passing of the Clean Air Act of 1999. That law, Republic Act 8749, established standards for hazardous pollutants and banning polluting practices such as incineration.

However, Greenpeace Climate Change and Energy Campaigner Yu told the Businessmirror the Philippines lagged behind in implementation of the law and its provisions, such as updating standards regularly.

“For almost two decades, air pollutants such as PM 2.5, PM 10, and Sulfur Oxide (SO2) from stationary sources were not updated,” he said. “By law, it should be revised every two years to be able to respond to new research and global standards. It was only last year that a revision was made for PM 2.5 air standards.”

Air toxicity

BEFORE the Covid pandemic tore apart the “normal life” across the globe, Greenpeace released a study about the toxic air from fossil fuels. It said the country is losing 1.9 percent of gross domestic product annually, with 4.4 million work absences and 27,000 premature deaths due to air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels from the transport and energy sector.

On the other hand, Yu said the DENR came up with their findings as early as 2015 with their National Air pollution status report (2008 to 2015) enumerating the health impacts of air pollution.

“Coal, considered the dirtiest form of energy, expanded exponentially since the passage of the Clean Air Act. It is now the largest source of energy with 52 percent of share in the national generation mix,” Yu said. “In response to this, the DENR declared that air pollution is considered a top priority.

“But a year after, we have yet to see significant developments in updating air pollution standards for the transport and energy sector,” he added.

Not safe

ASKED if the DENR’S air quality management program helps make the air we breathe healthy, or at least safe, Yu said “the government is mandated to address air pollution.”

“But they have yet to make significant strides to provide us with better air quality because we still have limited air pollution monitors across the country,” he told the Businessmirror. “The public will not feel safe if they don’t know if the air they are breathing is clean or not.”

According to him, by Greenpeace’s own account, the Philippines only has a fleet of 55 government-owned PM2.5 monitoring stations. Twenty-two are stationed in Metro Manila while some are not strategically located in areas with high PM2.5 concentrations, such as major highways and coal plants. Bataan, which houses major megawatt-coal plants, has a lone PM2.5 monitor for the whole province, Yu noted.

The government, Yu said, should not wait for the pandemic to end before prioritizing air pollution.

“It is an ongoing crisis affecting everyone,” he said. “The solutions will both solve air pollution and contribute in addressing the climate crisis.”

Enhanced transparency

GREENPEACE, along with other advocates of clean air, have identified a set of demands for the Duterte administration (See Sidebar). The demands include a declaration that air pollution is a national issue and, hence, order all line agencies involved in air quality monitoring and regulation must prioritize the issue.

He also thinks there should be enhanced transparency in expediting the review and updating of the air pollution standards under RA 8749.

The government, Yu said, should also issue a moratorium on all “Permits to Operate Air Pollutant Installations,” especially for proposed coal power plants until the “Ambient Air Quality Guideline Values and Standards and Emission Standards” are updated.

Time running out

GREENPEACE and other environmental organizations based in the Philippines join advocates across the globe in challenging governments to honor commitments under the Paris Agreement. The agreement, signed on December 12, 2015, seeks to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels.

Ibay said the WWF is calling on all stakeholders “to work together to take our commitments even further and to act upon them.”

“We look forward to continued constructive engagement with the government, the various agencies and other stakeholders on the key aspects of the Philippine NDC and look towards its enhancement and the attainment of goals set therein,” Ibay said. “We are running out of time in the fight against climate change, and our islands will be among the worst affected should we fail to change course now.”

She, however, emphasizes that the Duterte government must “act swiftly, with higher ambition and with a great sense of urgency.”

Hopefully, on Earth Day 2022, she would not be disappointed.